MXF update

Thought I should give people an update on the ongoing MXF work that is happening in GStreamer. Sebastian Droge is working hard on making sure we have full support for MXF a job not made any easier by the fact that MXF is a very complex container format aimed at a wide range of use cases. We bought the full DVD of specifications from SMPTE recently for Sebastian in order to ensure he had all the documentation needed to get it right.

Thanks to many helpful people in the community we now also have a healthy collection of test files for MXF which should enable us to make sure our demuxer interoperates with all the major MXF creation tools out there. The MXF demuxer has come quite far, it has still some way left to go, so while you might be able to play back a few files already, it is to early to ask the community to jump in and try to hammer the demuxer with all their files.

Once the demuxer is in the state we want it the plan is to continue onto write a muxer for MXF, a job which should be a little easier as we can start with a minimal part of MXF and extend it over time as long as our initial part is big enough to create valid MXF files. People interested in following development should of course check out gst-plugins-bad from CVS.

MPEG TS update

On the topic of container formats I have been testing our MPEG TS muxer based on a patch provided by community contributor Vanista. The goal of the testing is making sure the MPEG TS muxer is able to generate files that the Playstation 3 is able to play back perfectly. The Playstation 3 is quite strict about what it supports, so the files you create need to perfectly match the specific profile the PS3 has support for. But once we get this sorted GStreamer should actually become one of the best tools available for creating these files as it seems even on windows people are forced to use a lot of random tools to get a working MPEG TS file with AC3 and H264 inside. My goal is to be able to store the few US DVD’s I have compressed like this on my PS3, as I no longer have a multizone DVD player at home (just using my PS3 these days to play DVD’s). Remuxing the original AC3 audio and compressing the video with H264 seems like the best combination possible for me in terms of balancing storage space use versus sound and image quality. People interested in that effort can follow this bug entry (yes I know its a little suboptimal to keep a discussion going on a closed bug :)

Dries: MXF files from the Sony XDCAMs should already work with the demuxer in gst-plugins-bad. It’s “normal” MPEG2 video and is stored as SMPTE D10 essence inside MXF files (at least for my two sample files from XDCAM devices were like this). If you can provide some more sample files from such a cam that’d be nice :)